The Kindness of Strangers:

...It was a feasible form of demographic control...

...The child oblated to a monastery almost always came with a bequest to meet the costs of supporting him....Moreover, a powerful local family often dominated the religious house, which would choose its abbots from the family's oblated members...

...According to John Boswell, the conventional practice was to leave the baby at a public place, on the doorstep of a church, convent, or monastery, or- after the fourteenth century-at a foundling hospital...

...His motif throughout, then, is optimistic if not exactly euphoric...

...or when the illegitimacy of the child was too socially egregious (resulting from the union of a slave and master, or from a liaison involving a priest or nun-though Boswell's translations include one record wherein an abbess delivers a baby boy, and the Blessed Mother miraculously transports it to a holy hermit, who is delighted to raise the child...

...Through many of the centuries considered in this book, between 20 and 30 percent of all babies born were abandoned or given away...

...In fact, it was the alternative, almost invariably bearing the intention that kindly strangers would find and raise the baby...

...Furthermore, although the title of the book-The Kindness of Strangers (the phrase is from Tertullian)-is arresting, the notion that those adopting the foundlings were strangers might be challenged...

...Parents chose or were forced to abandon babies for various reasons: when they were ashamed (after incest or adultery...

...The abbot managed the monastery's endowment in the family's interests...

...Boswell claims, however, that as many as 25 percent of marriages were infertile (largely due to malnutrition), or had no surviving children...

...Probably these were the kind strangers most willing to rear abandoned children...

...Boswell shows that reunions were often planned: abandoning parents might leave a significant token- a special swaddling cloth or an amulet- with the baby, so that the parent could later recognize the child...

...And although one-third could be expected to die in infancy, there still might be too many mouths to feed in a subsistence economy plagued by famine and frequent death...

...Peggy R. Ellsberg The Kindness of Strangers is a riveting historical examination of how the late antique and medieval periods handled a surprisingly topical problem: what to do with unwanted children...

...What he discovered was that child abandonment was a fairly universal practice not only among pagans but among Christians as well, among poor and rich, and at all times and in all places...

...The child ultimately becomes a bishop...

...With the increased prosperity of the eleventh and twelfth centuries evidence of child abandonment nearly vanished, and parents raised their own offspring...

...Still, even if he has overinter-preted his sources to fit that thesis, the book is highly original, daring, provocative, and absolutely fascinating...

...But by the fourteenth century, with its catastrophic plagues, wars, and famines, the problem of unwanted children became so widespread that foundling hospitals were established throughout Europe...

...But the main reasons for child abandonment seem to be economic...

...In those centuries before the romanticization and sentimentalization of the child, before the post-psychoanalytic recognition of the complexity of childhood, it was acceptable, even conventional, not just to abandon, but to sell or rent a child...

...In researching his previous book, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980), Boswell reports that he was intrigued by several early Christian admonishments that "men should not visit brothels or have recourse to prostitutes because in doing so they might unwittingly commit incest with a child they had abandoned...

...Reviewers and historians alike have found Boswell's thesis controversial and troubling...

...In researching this phenomenon, John Boswell consulted church fathers, the annals of canon and civil law, baptismal records, archives of hospitals, letters, legends, censuses, all the demographic findings that cliometric wizardry can provide, and, it would seem every secondary source in every pertinent language ever published...

...It is rare for a scholarly book of medieval history to receive as much critical attention and public discussion as this one has, or to appeal so deeply to a current issue and to a general audience...

...Though these charitable institutions-run by the church-were founded with the best intentions, they became death traps, their crowding and disease contributing to an astronomical mortality rate...

...Medieval people did not write about their feelings the way we do, so we have little record of parental anguish-though there must have been plenty...

...As though to bring relief from the heart-wrenching facts of unweaned, unnamed, whimpering infants left in marketplaces or sold by starving parents, medieval literature and comic dramas from Shakespeare to Fielding to Gilbert and Sullivan abound with long-lost parents, children, and siblings reuniting after yearr of separation...

...when the child was deformed...

...Abandonment, while not a happy solution, "curtailed the heirs without actually eliminating the children...

...It seems likely that in the compact, crowded communities and villages of feudal Europe, most people would know whose baby it was they were picking up from a doorstep...

...Exposure" of an infant by no means involved the hope that it would "die of exposure...

...Boswell introduces his study by calling it "the investigation of a mystery"-a mystery that even after his dazzling research remains more or less unsolved: who abandoned their children, to what or to whom, and why...

...Boswell points out that the Latin expositio means to make public, to expose a baby meant to leave it in a public place...

...He had always understood that pagans left babies on hillsides to die and that Christians could be counted on to rescue them...

...This criticism raises the underlying question of whether Boswell defines "abandonment" too loosely in this study...

...The oblation of a child did not obliterate the consciousness or obligations of kinship...

...In the more precarious ecologies and fragile social structures of pre-modern Europe, a...

...marriage might produce eight to fifteen children in ten to twenty years...

...A child would be given to a monastery and would be expected to spend his or her life there...

...However, as David Herlihy pointed out in his review of this book in the Boston Globe, oblation should be seen only tangentially as abandonment...

...He argues, however, and tries to prove, that abandonment should not be conflated with infanticide...

...Boswell also looks at the practice of oblation as a form of abandonment...

...Oblation was common in the earlier Middle Ages...

...Boswell includes a legal document addressing this eventuality in an impressive appendix of his own translations of Greek and Latin texts, texts that offer eloquent demonstrations of the author's contentions...

...If the abandoned baby should die before it was found, the parents were legally culpable...

...Boswell himself demonstrates that adoptive relationships were often contractual, and that complex systems of reciprocal social obligation might well have attended the taking on of a child...

...Boswell sees abandonment as an extreme measure taken not to extinguish, but to save a child's life...